About the Reform Coalition

The Reform Coalition is a blending of two big ideas:

First, the idea of a Coalition Cabinet, announced in advance of the election and also presenting to the public a Balanced Budget in advance of election day; this was developed by Robert Steele with a greal deal of help from Jim Turner, Jock Gill, and Michael Cudahy, and input from many others. For the first time in modern history–not since Abraham Lincoln did something similar with “team of rivals,” the best and the brightest have been identified without regard to partisan affiliation. You can see the nominees, each of whom is being contacted now that the campaign has started; those that do not accept the offer to be a designee will be replaced via a crowd-sourcing process that will make whatever Coalition Cabinet finally formed a true cabinet Of, By, and For We the People.

Second, inspired by Occupy and combined with the FACT that over 43% of eligible voters now identify themselves a Independent, is the idea of a political coalition of all those who have to this point been shut out of the two-party bi-opoly. This includes, in addition to Independents, all the Greens, all the Libertarians, all the Reforms, all the members of the many small parties that are excluded by corrupt state ballot access constraints, and finally, all of the moderates–such as myself–who have lost faith in the ability of either of the two parties that hoard their grasp of power, to actually serve the public interest.

The Reform Coalition has two potential paths to actually winning the Presidency and one potential path to winning both the Presidency and several seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The most immediate and promising path would energize both Occupy and non-Occupy activists to demand of every Senator and Congressman now serving the passage of a law–a law that is within the power of Congress–mandating that all candidates from all accredited national parties (this includes the Green, Libertarian, and Reform parties) that are campaigning for national office, be included in all state ballots. Of course the two-party bi-opoly does not want this, they have killed it each of the six times it has been presented in the past, but Spring 2012, when Occupy comes back out in force, might be promising for finally forcing Congress and the two-party tyranny to be honest and actually do something that is clearly in the public interest. Others will have to fight this battle–activists who are not associated with a presidential campaign. The reality is that in today’s political environment, this is the one thing Senators and Representatives could do to neutralize the growing desire of their constituencies to dump them all.

Americans Elect is the other path. We believe they will succeed in collecting enough signatures to be on every ballot, and we believe that the two-party tyranny will stop at nothing to litigate Americans Elect out of as many states as possible. Americans Elect has not helped itself by being obscure about its funding and ignorant about electoral laws at the state level. Their web site is a sad pale reflection of what they could be building, a truly robust participatory democracy platform able to connect 300 million voters to facts, deliberative dialog tools, and various forms of polling and voting, along with direct access to the Federal Budget and a structured way to create a Balanced Budget. In brief, Americans Elect is a small crapshoot inside a much larger crapshoot, and while we hope they will emerge intact across the 50 states, we are extremely skeptical about their being anything other than more Wall Street theater. If John Huntsman is given the Americans Elect imprimateur and access to state ballots, as Christine Todd has offered five times (all five times in violation of her signed agreement with Americans Elect) then we will know that Americans Elect is the Wall Street “third way” to fool Americans they are getting a President that is neither left or right, but the fact is that absent integrity, Americans Elect will simply be helping elect another puppet subject to the machinations of the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, the neo-conservatives, the various foreign lobbies, and of course the cash and carry looters of the public treasury.

In our view, only a fully transparent Coalition Cabinet, with a fully transparent Balanced Budget and a complete commitment to both Electoral Reform and True Cost Economics, can offer America the Beautiful a path back toward being a Republic. Anything less is a scam, a perpetuation of the empire of illusion and theater of the insane.